There's so much to say about this image.

First off, for the literal-minded people in my audience, and there are several of you, that is a manipulated image. It condenses a sequence of images I captured one afternoon. I assembled them in an artful way I like to think.

We live by a river, the Dodder. We're in a house on the right. See the ReMax signs? The one in between. We've got upper and lower decks.

There's a Heron in the neighborhood. Its beat encompasses a 50 yd. stretch of the river just outside. We're Americans, we use yards.

Riko was excitedly pointing to the Heron (back when we were excited about the heron) and I was snapping three shots in short succession of it flying upstream.

It's a pretty good bird, and Whiskey wants a piece of it in the worst way. That dog will hunt. (Do you know how fast he is? Answer: surprisingly.)

When we arrived in Dublin, Whiskey was always drawn to something that looked to me like raisins on the ground by the walk along the river. Right where we usually see that bird sitting.

Whiskey ate a few of the raisins but I was always trying to keep him away from them. Riko'd been walking Whiskey along the same path but concluded that the same stuff was actually vomit. She convinced me of this.

One day I spotted an elderly neighbor woman doing something near the heron one morning. I asked and it turns out the stuff on the sidewalk wasn't vomit that never washes away as we thought. It's tuna-based cat food that the old woman leaves out for the bird. She's almost got the thing eating out of her hand. She refreshes the supply frequently and the bits that the heron can't get with its beak look like little golden raisin-y remainders of something unpleasant.

We don't feel so sick about whiskey getting a few nibbles of the stuff now.